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How do you make Nigel Farage doubt that the UK should leave the European Union? Tell him the French are in favour of it.

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Britain would be better off outside EU says M Nicolas Firzli

I am French, and I support Brexit. It is enough to make the most fervent British eurosceptic, even the Ukip leader, suspicious. But I write here not as a Frenchman but, first and foremost, as an economist. I believe the UK would be better off out of the EU or in a leaner, reformed union based solely on trade and investment, which might or might not evolve after Brexit – but that's another story for another time.

It is as an economist that I believe that on June 23, Britain should vote to leave. That's the rational thing to do considering the paltry “deal” David Cameron struck in Brussels in February.

Europe and the world are very different from what they were in 1973 when Britain joined the European Economic Community. Compared to what it has become – the European Union – the EEC was a simpler, relatively efficient economic and trading association, with a minimal degree of legal harmonisation regarding commercial issues, antitrust regulation, employment law and consumer protection.

The EEC was also more balanced, with only nine member-states – as opposed to 28 today – and the founding Franco-German “couple” at the helm. The French economy was growing faster than the UK and the EEC had a higher GDP per capita than Britain – Germany and France being respectively 25% and 30% richer than the UK.

China and India were among the world’s 20 poorest counties, with GDP per capita lower than Afghanistan. Britain’s Francophile Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, was happy to join a trading bloc that offered the promise of economic renewal and “modernisation”.

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It’s a very different kind of world today. France has become the “sick man of Europe” and an enlarged, swollen European Union dominated by Germany and a caste of high-handed do-gooder bureaucrats based in Brussels has the unenviable distinction of combining low economic growth prospects, high unemployment, dangerously low birth rates and soon-to-be insolvent pension funds – Holland, Britain, Denmark and Sweden being the only EU members with reasonably funded retirement systems.

Yet, in the past 20 years, British policy-makers have quietly acquiesced in the gradual transformation of the EEC (Maastricht Treaty in 1993, then Amsterdam in 1999, Nice in 2003 and Lisbon in 2007) into a “progressive” political experiment founded on the deceptive notion of an “ever-closer union”.

London stayed out of the eurozone, but most British voters did not realise that the preservation of their national currency wouldn’t be enough to shield them from the tightening grip of EU laws and regulations. Every year, the British Parliament is forced to pass tens of new statutes reflecting the latest EU directives coming from Brussels (a highly undemocratic process known as “transposition”).

Slowly but surely, these new laws dictated by EU commissars are conquering English common law, imposing upon UK businesses and citizens an ever-growing collection of fastidious regulations in every field – from the horsepower of your car engine to the type of lightbulb you’re allowed to use in your country house and the precise percentage of proteins in every can of chicken soup.

Nothing seems to stop the soft totalitarianism of EU laws as the EU Commission and Parliament keep on drafting and passing invasive directives meant to further “integrate” the member-states “for their own good” – the death of national sovereignty by a thousand bureaucratic cuts.

From the Calais 'Jungle' fiasco to Russia’s annexation of Crimea (filed under EU Common Foreign and Security Policy), and from the failed Common Agricultural Policy (subsidised by UK taxpayers to the tune of £2 billion a year in net terms after rebate) to the practically defunct Schengen visa rules – not to mention the unresolved European “debt crisis” and the mounting pressures on the single currency utopia – most EU policies have proven ineffective in the recent past.

Yet many mainstream commentators in the UK seem to believe that leaving the EU would be a folly – “forward, comrade” seems to be the motto of Britain’s enthusiastic europhiles.

There are many examples of counterproductive regulatory overreach by EU policy-makers – some of whom have little or no grasp of modern financial economics. When it comes to the City of London, the Capital Requirements Directive, known as the ‘CRD IV’ legislative package on bank capital adequacy, is a case in point.

The “corporate governance” and remuneration provisions of CRD IV constitute a typical example of EU good intentions gone wrong. By capping bonuses very rigidly, these provisions will eventually chase talented financial experts away from UK banks and insurance companies, driving them into the arms of hedge funds, venture capital firms and non-EU banks, thus creating a dangerous human resources imbalance, with the best and the brightest joining the likes of Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle or New York and Geneva-based investment banks.

As for the core part of CRD IV, the articles dealing with capital adequacy, they simply paraphrase the Basel II and Basel III norms issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, of which the Bank of England is an influential member.

Just like their Swiss or American counterparts, MPs in Westminster could simply have transposed parts of Basel II and Basel III into national law their way, without adding yet another layer of coercive regulation laced with anti-capitalist EU “moralism”.

In a post-Brexit Era, the same Britain-First logic would apply to free trade, cross-border investments, security arrangements (Nato), and so on. The UK can always sign bilateral or “global” treaties if it sees fit, case by case – as opposed to being force-fed indiscriminately all the ridiculous directives churned out compulsively by a swollen European Union.

As for the risk of “loss of economic attractiveness” of Britain outside the EU, this is largely a myth. Cash-rich institutional investors such as North American pension funds and insurance companies or Asian sovereign wealth funds have not curtailed their investments in UK assets because of the uncertainties surrounding the referendum. Quite the contrary.

On February 25, three of the four largest Canadian pension funds (Omers, Ontario Teachers and AIMCo) and Kuwait’s national wealth fund KIA announced they had acquired London City Airport for £2 billion. They are expected to spend tens of millions more in the coming years to modernise this brownfield infrastructure asset. This foreign direct investment is a resounding vote of confidence in the City and the attractiveness of the UK economy.

Tellingly, the winning bidders for the airport had to compete against other eager North American and Chinese public and private institutional investors – not to mention UK pension funds – at a time when France, Germany (home to EU Parliament President Martin Schulz) and Poland (the country of EU Council President Donald Tusk) are struggling laboriously to attract long-term capital commitments to their ageing airports, rails and highways in spite of the many subsidies, soft loans ad fiscal incentives offered by the European Union.

Farage should not worry. That a Frenchman agrees with him does not mean he is wrong.

• M Nicolas Firzli is director general of the World Pensions Council and an advisory board member for the World Bank Global Infrastructure Facility